ManyPixels
On Demand Graphic Design
About a year and half ago I launched a community on productized services.
This weekend, we crossed 1400 members (and 1200 active members according to FB group insights), a pretty good milestone!
The community goals are the following:
- Get help to launch your productized service
- Exchange ideas on business models, marketing, building a team, tools to use
- Get feedback on your productized service ideas / strategies
- Get early adopters for your productized service
Until the end of the year I'll take a small step back from ManyPixels to fully focus on it and do the following:
- Write more content (I wrote two free books but planning to write much more)
- Interview productized service founders
- Potentially invest in / co-start productized services.
- Focus on my SaaS for productized services, ManyRequests
Here it is: https://www.facebook.com/groups/192719694795609/
After writing my first book in 24 hours (http://www.productizebook.co) I have written my second book on productized services: Productize Marketing
The book comprises my experience of marketing my own productized service (ManyPixels) but also features tons of other case studies from WPBuffs, 24Slides, Video Husky, and other productized services.
You can read the book for free here: http://www.productizemarketing.co
Happy to answers any questions you may have too!
It took us more than a year to stabilise the business! (Productized services are hard - you have to assemble the right value proposition, in front of the right type of customers, but you also need to build an excellent team to deliver the services) but we had an excellent last 4 weeks, and just crossed $60,000 in revenue.
Goal this year will be to hit the holy grail of $83,000/month ($1m ARR!), we still have a couple of months to cross it.
That's pretty cool!
Happy to answer any questions / share my learnings of the journey :)
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That's insane! Well done!
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Thanks :) !
It took way longer than expected actually to achieve that milestone. But it's all about the journey... If your journey has growth (personally, for your staff, ...), learnings and fun along the way then it's a good journey overall that's really good!
I think I'll be thinking more about that instead of stressing myself too much over revenue goals since it's like having a tunnel vision. Play for the long game, it compounds, and the results will be there :)
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Congrats!
And I would agree on the awesome team angle. Hiring the right people is so hard, but when it works it's like a breath of fresh air.
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Exact feeling I have. And for them, it is too.
My learning is that if you can't find great people for your role, try to first understand if you can fix anything for them first.
When you employees have a job they like (in our case: remote work, competitive compensation vs. local rates, and non boring work as they constantly are working on different projects), it's also easier for them to be great at it!
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This is amazing. Well done
What's been the most counter-intuitive thing that you've come across building ManyPixels?
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Here is my biggest learning where I was really wrong but my co-founders turned out to be right:
Awesome team > Processes
I used to be almost like a freak in terms of building processes, templates. I wanted to "fix" design subjectivity (you can see it in my IH interview) by forcing designers to use templates etc. Instead, my co-founders told me: Hire awesome people (who communicate well and understand well customer needs) and let them do their job. We did that, we created a great environment for them, and will probably help them a bit with processes later.
I also have some learnings on marketing, team building, and creating a value proposition that I will write in a free book this week.
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Interesting, can't wait to read the book when you release it.
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I already wrote a free book but will release one tonight or tomorrow night specifically on marketing.
Here is the free book: www.productizebook.co (don't worry - no need to leave your email, it is just a Google Doc ;))
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Am interested in reading your book on marketing. Please reply to this thread when it comes out.
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Hi there, Robin!
Thank you for sharing your success with us on this platform. I just downloaded your book from Google Docs. Would you be able to give me some advice?
My interest is to create a productized service where I can help businesses integrate Augmented Reality onto their platforms (web3D and mobile) for the promotion of their products and to increase their sales.I might be overthinking it, but I'm struggling to figure out what that would mean in practical terms and how to productize it.
For Augmented Reality, it's mostly through mobile devices that this can be done and on websites, Web3D is how 3D models of a product, like a chair for instance, can be showcased on the internet. I'm a decent programmer but would want to build a team, so hiring a programmer, UX Designer, a 3D model artist and a Social Media Manager are the positions I feel that I would need to get started.
As far as a business model, I'm also trying to figure out how to create a product that includes monthly subscriptions for our services. I'll read your book ASAP, but if anything comes to mind, please let me know!
Thank you again for sharing. It's great to learn about your work!
- Wyntonio
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I've been following your product/service for a while. It's a tad on the expensive side for me :( Maybe a cheaper, simpler plan? Although likely I'm just not your target market
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Sure - you can use the code MP25OFF for 25% off on your first month.
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super dope! I'm interested to hear about your margins? You have to pay your team etc. How much is profit before tax?
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Very cool, congrats! How many people do you have on your team?
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25!
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wow! congrats!
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Is there any specific implementation for your subdomain and root domain in terms of Google Analytics measurement?
Missing this important point would affect your Google Analytics Data health.
What I mean exactly is:
You have the root domain: manypixels.co
You have the gallery page: gallery.manypixels.co
You have a blog: blog.manypixels.coIf someone jumps out between your subdomains/root domains Google Analytics is going to mark them as a new session. You wouldn't want to see the same user as a new user on your G. Analytics report. It would affect your Data Health as well as your future improvements based on your data.
Not a big deal for now but it'll be important if you continue to grow at this pace.
Also, I am wondering how you handle Website UI Design. Let's say I'll demand a 7-page web design from you. Normally, it takes a minimum of 30 days with a UI designer according to my experience because there are many revisions, extra ideas, and communication problems. It really depends on the customer's demand, but do you have any average order time for a web design project?
The last question, as far as I understood, I can add extra designs such as a logo or a business card if you finish that 7-page web design, right?
I really liked the product and your web site design.
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Hey drumpoll,
Yes we do have to fix our SEO/subdomains!
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We have all kind of design projects. All customers are required to come up with wireframes (even rough ones) to save on time and our designers/managers are trained to ask many questions to reduce lead time. I didn't calculate the average yet but it can be as low as 1 day for a fully finished landing page to 1-2 weeks for longer projects with lots of page sand lots of back and forth.
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Yes you can make as many design requests as you want (in your request queue) and queue them up and down. Once that project is finished, your designer will work on the second project and so on!
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Congratulations Robin! Well done!
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hey would love to learn more! I'm a productized service business. How do you deliver? I've been thinking of a semblance of no-code tools like woo commerce + zendesk, etc
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Wrote a book on it :) www.productizebook.co
Mostly we developed on our platform but that's not really necessary at the beginning. Use tools!
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congratulations @Vinrob !! !
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Thank you!
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Congrats 👏
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Thanks!
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Wow! It's amazing! I read the story from your book few weeks ago. Such inspiring things!
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Thank you, and hope you enjoyed the book!
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Congratulations Robin!
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Thanks!
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Hello,
Hope you all are having a good day.
I'm a recently hired software developer that will someday like to build a product that provides value as an indie hacker.
I have a few questions that I'll appreciate any input that I can get.
How can I build my online presence as a newbie developer?
Are there any recommended websites, forums, meetups, or conferences that can help me out in my journey?
Are there any specific Reddit groups or platforms that I can add value?
Thanks for the pieces of advice in advance.
July was a really good month for ManyPixels: We crossed 550 requests submitted on the platform: Our biggest number ever.
We're still trying to grow that number as it means there is a lot of usage on our platform (and thus higher retention = lower churn)
I wrote a book in 24 hours of my experience of building ManyPixels.
You can find the book here: http://www.productizebook.co
The book covers 8 chapters to build your produtctized service from scratch, along with many case studies, tools, and resources.
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I read the book. Short, but insightful. A minor problem: the images quality, at least from mobile, is really low and some of them are almost impossibile to read.
I have a few questions, some of them are or can be considered sensitive so you obviously don't need to answer:
- as you said, it is important to the success of the company to have repeating customers. What kind of people need unlimited designs? I suppose mostly agencies and freelancers that want to resell them, but I could be way off.
- How many designs do they ask you on average? (Basic plan).
- I read that you have just started out with Facebook ads, so maybe my question is premature, considering the fact that you will need time to get it right, but what's your CAC from facebook ads?
- I saw your website, multiple times actually (I consider it incredibly well done and a good source of inspiration). Regarding the copy, you basically sell the service instead of the benefits. Yes, you say that it's fast, fixed pricing and quality guaranteed, but you don't talk about how design can grow a business. I suppose you did A/B tests and it didn't work well but maybe I gave you an idea.
- I noticed that your website os superfast from desktop but average from mobile so I suppose that most of your customers come from desktop. Am I right?
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Really solid content! Thank you, it’s inspired me to think bigger and this is an avenue I never thought about!
So this is perhaps the biggest accomplishment we've done so far this year: Decreasing our churn.
Decreasing churn is perhaps even more important than having more sales. We're still at the same amount of new customers gained each month but a lower churn means happier customers and a healthier foundation of our business. A low churn means we're closer to attaining P/M fit (though I wouldn't say we're there yet)
Our subscription is moderately priced (USD $399/month) but churn has been high since the beginning (difficult to set up the operations of that type of business, setting up the right expectations for the team etc)
Last month we released our platform (video here: https://www.loom.com/share/5c5c97447b4e4b4189048aeed8ad3bb7) and it immediately impacted our churn (in a very positive way).
I believe the #1 goal of technology is to bring you closer to your customers / deliver more value to them and our platform did exactly that.
Last but not least -- this achievement is mostly thanks to our development team and designers as well as my two co-founders (I only stayed focused on sales and not on operations last month)
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As someone who wants to use your service but can't pay that expensive of a subscription, the churn might be from people who only intented to pay one or two months, get the most they can out of it, and cancel.
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Hey @sandywilkinscr ! Totally, lots of customers come for one month and leave as they get all their work done.
You can use the code MP25OFF for 25% off on your first month if you want to get some work done :)
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Congrats Robin!
Definitely correct saying that decreased churn can be more impactful than more sales. It's a huge factor in customer LTV.
Not sure what type of analysis you do on churn, but I wrote about looking at customer cohorts for churn, awhile back. Hopefully there's something useful in here for you.
https://medium.com/@mattpupa/how-to-measure-customer-retention-using-cohorts-14a684669af3
Matt
Last year while building ManyPixels I started a fun project on the side: Building a community of productized service entrepreneurs / tech-enabled agencies.
I think this is an interesting business model / easy to start and most importantly: It delivers tons of value to customers.
The community has grown really well and is super active (engagement rate is up 500%) and I gathered some leading productized service entrepreneurs: Russ Perry (Design Pickle), Alex McClafferty (WPCurve, sold to GoDaddy) and Joe Howard (WpBuffs)
On a fun side: It also helped me to get some customers from ManyPixels even though it wasn't intended at all so here's a tip: Build your FB group and a community around you - that's invaluable!
Here is the group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/192719694795609/
I will be launching a website soon too.
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This is exactly what i was hoping for! Requested to join the FB group!
This is a cool update we launched a week ago: You can now rate how your request went!
So far the stats are... impressive for the first 24 requests completed:
- 19 requests have received a 5 stars rating
- 1 request has received a 4 stars rating
- 1 request has received a 1 star rating (but that customer 2nd request received a 4 stars rating)
- 3 requests have yet to receive any ratings
Picture here of the ratings system: https://imgur.com/a/X5o2qcu
Hey IH'ers!
Here's a small promo code to start your weekend: 30% OFF on your subscription with the following code: IH30
Some ideas of things you can request:
https://blog.manypixels.co/post/best-designs-manypixels-may-2019
You'll get your personal graphic designer, can request everything you want (though your designer will work on your request 1 by 1) and you get a money back guarantee if you do not like the work :)
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I created a promo thread to try to encourage these types of posts into one place - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/6d47f5d73c
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Tried to send you a message on Twitter, but I couldn't. Anyways, wanted to applaud you on the design of ManyPixels. It's beautiful. I browsed it and even though I personally don't have purpose of it, I can't stop browsing it! Is it only you working this project?
Great job.
One of my growth strategy this year was to grow the number of newsletter subscribers.
We did so via three ways:
- Marketing engineering (creating a gallery of free illustrations)
- Creating valuable content on our blog for our audience
- Facebook advertising
My 2019 goal: 20,000 subscribers (I will update you if I hit it!)
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This is awesome @Vinrob! How much did you spend on Facebook, if you don't mind me asking?
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About USD $20 to $25 / day. We're ramping up our Facebook Ads strategy in July with a new funnel, new content and a dedicated designer / performance marketing guy to create the ads.
Here's the collaboration with my personal ManyPixels designer (yes, I am using my own product and "bought" a subscription of ManyPixels ) : https://imgur.com/a/1MiQB5f
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Super useful. Thank you!!
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What was your total cost (approximately)? Ads + hours creating the content, to reach 20K?
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- Design = I "bought" a subscription of ManyPixels (USD $399/month) and have my designer creating on average 3-4 ads, blog posts header, and lead magnets/exit intent designs. See collaboration here: https://imgur.com/a/1MiQB5f
- Performance marketing costs = USD $20 to $25/day (USD $600/month)
- Content creation = myself, I spend about 6 hours a week a week just on content, let's say I charge USD $100/hr, then $600/week (USD $2400/month)
Total = USD $3400/month so about USD $0,5 per lead since I acquired most of the leads in the past month (this doesn't include the time to develop the gallery: 1 week, and another ManyPixels designer who creates about 25 illustrations a week for the free illustration gallery)
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Amazing! I'm also working really hard on growing my email list. I've hit 1,000 through the use of Reddit. Out of your 3 strategies, which provided the most sign-ups?
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Reddit is great. And it is really a great idea you built your own subreddit. Creating a community helps you become an influencer/build trust/educate customers.
I have my own little community on FB called Productized Startups which brought the highest quality leads but the lowest number of leads. In terms of highest quantity / lowest quality I would say it is our free illustration gallery (https://gallery.manypixels.co). The gallery buzzed on many media / blogs and actually (according to SimilarWeb), our most popular country is China. We have about 1500 email subscribers from China (and a few - I think 2 or 3 did actually go and buy a subscription) but they mostly use our free gallery which I am happy with as well. We were able to make a product that really speaks to everyone and that's really cool. We might translate our site one day to convert them into actual customers.
And thanks again for bringing me attention to Budget Meal Planner :D I will be moving next year in a more expensive place where I'll have to cook and this is helpful haha!
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Exactly, building a community around your product has proven to be very beneficial. Especially because you can 'sellout/spam' your own content without getting negative feedback.
That is interesting you have a high amount of viewership from China. Do you feel like that is hurting you at all?
I'm just trying to think if my audience suddenly spiked for non-English speaking... of course my project is way different, but I wouldn't be sure how to convert them. Unless you are translating, but then I feel out of control.
And that's awesome, I hope you do find use of the meal plans! I've got about 14 different themed ones I still need to add to the website, so you'll have lots to choose from soon :)
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Really curious. What was your approach on Reddit to get subscribers?
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I wrote this a few days ago with some details about it all https://www.indiehackers.com/product/budget-meal-planner/-Lh1-_MAk_iFV3tvBVab
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thank you!
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Help me understand? I don't see $2400 a month worth the newsletter subscribers? My guess is you can convert 6% into revenue somehow. This does not seem profitable.
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Wow this is awesome :O
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Huge number, congrats! I hope I'll reach it one day with my newsletter 😅
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Did you find Facebook advertising to be more worthwhile than google advertising?
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In our case... yes. Our product is priced at $399/month. Even though we have a money back guarantee my gut tells me that prospective customers need some sort of education / trust before buying. Having ads that explain what the product is on Facebook really helps in that sense.
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Wow, I'm envious!
You nailed it! How facebook advertising went for you?
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We have a profitable ROI with FB ads.
Due to the nature of our business (service business), we approach it cautiously so that we can grow not too fast (each new customer means we need to onboard new designers)
I made that mistake of growing super fast in month 2 where I acquired 200 subscribers in one month, and 90% of them churned). Now we're growing steadily, month over month.
Facebook advertising requires the following:
- A great value proposition (Ours is "Get your personal designer" -- usually talk with the words your customers use. I talked to 10 customers and they say: I love to talk to my personal designer --> SO I created an ad copy that said that. I used their language against them in a way)
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- Great content
- Videos
- Great ad designs
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- Great funnel
- Lead magnet (free content? ebook to download? free strategy session?)
- Landing page
- Email capture
- Great drip marketing emails (testimonials, education, ...)
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Great work!
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Thanks :D
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11 Comments
I wish I heard about productized services 3 years ago, would have made my life a lot easier.
I would have started one and then jumped into SaaS after I had the experience/money.
I see you have done that, Craig Hewitt from PodcastMotor did the same and many others.
Love this space! Recently launched my own productized service called ModelPilot after spending the past couple years building a more "traditional" professional service business in the finance advisory space. The productized model is so much more scalable - super excited to continue leaning into this biz model.
Robin, we are still friends on facebook (from your first batched learning activity back in 2018)! I want to send you a quick message, would that be OK? Saw you were active an hour ago so it's cool to see you still accessible here and on there. Let me know where would be best to reach you
yes feel free to reach out!
I am super pumped about this niche!
I think Productizing your service is the future of any agency model.
Since launching mine (Scalable UI/UX design systems/prototypes) we are about to cross 30K in MRR :)
This is great!! I'll send you an email later today :)
Awesome :)
Great work, Rob! Love your community and being a part of it.
Hey Robin! Beautiful site. As a designer, I have mixed emotions about the productization of my services BUT I think from a client perspective, you've got a very attractive offer here :)
I see that your premium offering includes logos and branding. I think my tool Logo Package Express could really be a huge time saver for your designers, while also vastly improving the quality of the logo assets they deliver for clients.
If your designers are making robust packages of logo file deliverables for your customers than I'm sure it takes a huge chunk of their time, and if they aren't, they should be. Logo Package Express ensures the best quality logo package (hundreds of files) in under 5 minutes :)
I have also made a Twitter thread about this decision: https://twitter.com/Vinrob/status/1168477018117160961
Robin, congrats on growing your facebook group.
You can check this tool (created by me) => https://groupleads.net that can help you to collect data and emails from new members joining your group.
You have option of saving their data to google sheet as well as importing the data to your email autoresponder service.